Cross Campus: 10.12.09

Bladderball wasn’t the only barrier to Elm Street traffic this weekend. Around 5 p.m. Friday, a Napoli Foods truck tried to turn back up Broadway and knocked over a fence in the center divider. “I got screwed,” said the driver, Matthew Gryzbek. who was delivering supplies to Something Fishy on Dixwell Avenue.

The memorial service for Annie Le GRD ’13 will take place today at 5 p.m. in Battell Chapel. Yale Secretary Linda Lorimer said in an announcement to the community late last week that the service will be “an opportunity for us to come together to celebrate the gifts of Annie’s life and her time with us at Yale, to share our grief over her death, and to support one another as a community.”

Beat Dartmouth, and cancer too. The Yale football team took to the field sporting pink armbands in their game against Dartmouth this past weekend in support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

The GoCrossCampus 2009 Ivy League Championship started this weekend with Turn 1 officially ending at 8 p.m. Sunday evening. Although Yale has 10 times the number of players as Harvard, Yale is currently behind Princeton.

Howard Dean ’71 will speak to the Yale College Democrats tonight at 5:45 in the Branford Common Room.

Tell us something we don’t already know. An Internet ranking released by The Daily Beast announced the Hartford-New Haven metropolitan area as the sixth smartest in the country. The entry cited Yale — “the third-oldest institution of higher education on the continent” — as a major factor in the decision. Hartford-New Haven finished behind Raleigh-Durham, San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Denver.

Yale investments czar David Swensen, in an interview with the Financial Times over lunch at Bentara on Orange Street, said one of his favorite things about Yale is the hockey team. “We’re winning,” he said, “and I love winning.”

The Yale fight song “Boola Boola” played during the closing credits of the latest episode of “The Simpsons,” “The Great Wife Hope,” which aired yesterday, even though Al Jean, the show runner for the episode, went to Harvard.

This day in Yale History

1988 A fire ignites in Woolsey Hall, causing at estimated $40,000 to $100,000 in damages. The blaze is believed to have started in the offices of the Yale Banner, the University’s yearbook. No one was injured except the upper floors of the building, which remained closed for repairs.